Area surveillance is important in a variety of applications in both military and civilian settings. A key challenge stems from the typical situation in which the number of locations needing surveillance is larger than the number of sensors available for collecting information. The complexity of the resulting surveillance environment makes execution of manual coordination and control extremely difficult, particularly as the number of cameras and targets increases, or when a limited number of cameras must surveil a significantly greater number of targets. In these situations, automatic control of available cameras is generally used to distribute available system-wide surveillance over the points-of-interest (POIs) where surveillance is desired. However, the methods employed often fail to fully optimize the assignment of a limited number of camera towers to a larger number of potential (secure) tower sites, and the capability of the system to provide appropriate surveillance periods for specific POIs is not fully exploited. Further, the methods currently employed may be overly scripted, so that an adversary seeking to impact (e.g., attack, plant a bomb, steal from) a certain POI may be able to predict when the surveillance system will be engaged in postures that render the adversary's actions detectable or undetectable.
It would be advantageous to provide a surveillance system that employs automatic control in a manner that optimizes and fully exploits the system's capability to provide, exactly or approximately, user-supplied or user-implied surveillance requirements for a large group of POIs. It would provide additional advantage if such a system could employ the automatic control in a manner relatively unpredictable to adversaries, such that aggregate long-term coverage satisfies surveillance requirements. It would provide further advantage if such a system provided, over a long term, the most efficient set of locations for a limited set of towers, with their associated cameras, and provided a scheduling process for surveillance that optimizes the use of those cameras.
These and other objects, aspects, and advantages of the present disclosure are further discussed in the following description.